SAFA Skysailor Magazine

13 January | February 2022 SKY SAILOR Commentary by Flightcoach The Flightcoach VR simulator is a product/ service of the Dutch company Flightcoach, founded by Bas van Duijn who you may know from his YouTube videos about the different mental aspects of paragliding – like fear, stress, risk management and decision-making. The simulator serves three different goals to complement and enhance the training of PG and PPG pilots: • • introducing new pilots to the sport, • • helping pilots keep current and • • training (student) pilots for PG and PPG. It is used worldwide by different schools/ clubs/federations to complement actual flying. In their simulator, you as a (student) pilot can focus on what you want to learn or improve, and eliminate everything that does not con- tribute to this. Learning like this means you can easily get up to two weeks’ worth of flying experience done in just one hour. Bas explains: “With a background as a commercial aviator, for me, learning part of flying in a simulator was completely normal. When I got into teaching paragliding 10 years ago, I was amazed that there were no ways to simulate paraglider flight. Flying (P)PG leans heavily on estimating speed, distance, height, wind, etc, etc, and adjusting your course based on these. These attributes can be hard to master, and I got a bit frustrated of seeing pilots of all levels make ‘sub-optimal’ choices without really learning from them. In flying (P)PG every flight is different. That’s beautiful… but from a didactics point of view, it’s actually horrible. How can you learn, if the game is different every time you play? To learn and develop as a pilot you need to have the ability to reflect as objectively as possible on what you did and also repeat your attempt with changing JUST ONE variable: the pilot input. Only then you can see the real impact you as a pilot have on the outcome of your decisions. In real flying this is impossible, in simulator flying it is inevitable. Example: you are practising spot landings and you came up short. We rewind time in your simulation, go back to an agreed moment from which you are going to try again, in the exact same conditions as before. Let’s say now you shorten your base leg a bit and see the effect of that: a spot landing! No more guesswork, no more discussions about what caused what and what ifs… no more misunderstandings. Got it right? Then we increase the difficulty by, for in- stance, introducing gusty wind or thermic activity and go again, and again, and again. Just as long until you mess it up again and we got your next learning experience right there. The next time you fly actual, your brain remembers all these virtual flights and the lessons you took away from it. Your flying career just got boosted. Together with my business partner, Hans Joore, I spent years recreating the actual sensation of flying (P)PG and this is the result. Hans is an aeronautical engineer specialising in simulator development, and an avid paraglider and gyro- copter pilot. Our simulator has been used to train hundreds of pilots to get skills like (dune) soaring, spot landing, thermalling and manoeuvres up to a whole new level. The standard response we hear is: “Wow, I did not expect to learn this much!”